A new way to highlight underrepresented candidates when sourcing

Today, we’re excited to release a new feature that will more easily connect underrepresented talent to companies hiring on AngelList Talent. When sourcing on our platform, recruiters can now select communities across gender and race/ethnicity to boost to the top of the list, on top of the regular search criteria. We won’t filter out other candidates that fit the criteria, but simply highlight underrepresented candidates in the search results. Candidates are informed on how the data will be used, and the diversity boost only uses self-reported data from the 2.3 million candidates who have chosen to self-identify so far.

Our commitment to representative, self-reported demographic data

This feature has been a long time coming — one that has been asked about for some time now, and one that has come with many learnings in the process. Most notably, building this product was a reminder of the power of user choice. This means that candidates should know how their data is being used and be able to choose whether to opt in or not.

We’re committed to upholding user choice by relying only on self-reported data. To do that, we built the following:

We updated the way Candidates can opt in to represent themselves, including:

• More gender identity options including non-binary and an option to self describe
• More race / ethnicity options including disaggregating Asian and Middle Eastern ethnicities
• The option to share pronouns and display it on one’s profile

We made the option to self-identify more discoverable and transparent by:

• Highlighting the demographic information section in other areas of our product to make it easy to self-identify for anyone who chooses to
• Sharing with candidates how the information may be used and emphasizing that self-identifying is optional

We launched the Diversity Boost using only self-reported data:

• We updated the gender selection options in the diversity boost to match the new choices from the candidate side
• We added in the ability to highlight candidates from underrepresented communities by race / ethnicity
• We began displaying pronouns on candidate profiles for any candidate that chose to share
• We built the diversity boost to only pull from self-reported data

Through this work, we’ve had more than 2.3 million candidates on our platform self-identify so far across gender, race / ethnicity, and/or pronouns. Any time the diversity boost is used, recruiters can be assured that the information is being shared directly from users.

What’s next

While we’re excited to be releasing the beta version of this feature, we know the work doesn’t end here. In addition to continuing to review feedback, collecting this demographic information from our candidates has also shown us the lack of representation in the candidates on AngelList Talent. And while this feature exists for this very reason — to highlight this talent — we’re also excited to hold ourselves more accountable in creating a more diverse pool of candidates in the first place.

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The Diversity Boost feature is available now for all Recruit Pro customers. If you have any feedback whatsoever, we’re all ears. You can reach us at [email protected].